Is 75 a good score on the Civil Service Exam?

No. A general rating of 75 does not pass the Career Service Examination. The passing rating is 80.00, for both Professional and Subprofessional, and 75 is below it.

The passing general rating is 80.00. A rating of 75 is a failing rating. There is no rounding, no partial pass, and no separate lower standard for either level.

That is the whole factual answer, and it is worth stating without cushioning, because two different people arrive at this question. If you have already been rated 75, the rest of this page is for you. If you are still preparing and picked up 75 somewhere as the number to aim at, correcting that now is the most useful thing this page can do — you would have stopped five points short.

How close is 75, really?

Closer than it feels, and less measurable than you would like.

A general rating is a score on a reporting scale, not a percentage of questions you answered correctly. How many additional correct answers would have moved 75 to 80 is not something the CSC publishes, so anybody telling you “you only needed four more items” is inventing the number. We are not going to do that.

What can be said honestly is that 75 is not the profile of somebody who does not know the material. It is much more often the profile of somebody who knows most of it and lost the rest somewhere specific — one weak subject, or the clock. What a rating of 80.00 actually means goes through what the number is and is not.

The mistake to avoid next time

Aiming at 80. If your practice average sits exactly on the pass mark, you have built in no room for the fact that everybody performs somewhat worse in an unfamiliar room, on a real clock, with no second attempt for months. The useful target is a practice average comfortably above the line, so that a bad morning still clears it.

The second mistake is re-reading everything. A 75 is not evidence that you missed everything; it is evidence that you missed something. Finding out what, specifically, is a different job from studying harder, and it comes first.

What to do with the number

Treat it as a measurement rather than a verdict, and then get a better measurement. One overall figure cannot tell you whether you ran out of time, ran out of coverage in two subjects, or knew it and came apart under the conditions — and those three need completely different months of work.

The free 50-question diagnostic reports by subject rather than as a single number, which is the form the answer has to take before it is any use. It takes under an hour. What a failing score actually tells you to do next works through the three cases and how to tell which was yours.

One last thing worth knowing: most candidates do not pass. Whatever a 75 is evidence of, it is not evidence that you are unusual.